I bought ReSharper a couple of weeks ago and I promised a review. In a netshell, ReSharper is outstanding. The refactoring features are the main reason I purchased ReSharper, but I have come to appreciate several other features. For example, ReSharper will highlight syntax errors in your code with red underlines or red text. This has definitely saved me a lot of time and far less failed compilations. Another really cool feature is that you can type the name of a class to use in your source code and it will give you the option to automatically add the "using namespace" for you. Yet another great feature is ReShaper's ability to infer the data type of a function's return value. So, you can type "x = foo()" and it can automatically add a field or local variable declaration for you. Last, but certainly not least, it can format code (”clean”) for you. I don't know how many times I've seen code that another developer left looking so ugly I wanted to puke. ReSharper takes care of that, and you can customize how the code gets formated. Very slick!
There is really only one down side and that is it can take some time for your project to load because ReSharper does assembly parsing and loads in caches, etc...but it is worth the wait and doesn't bother me all that much. Comparing ReSharper to Visual Studio 2005, I'd say that Visual Studio 2005 has better refactoring, and Visual Studio's support for code snippets (expansions) such as prop are easier to use than ReShaper's menus (perhaps I need to add hotkeys, but either way VS2005 is easier to work with).
I am really looking forward to IDE enhancements in Visual Studio 2005, and for now I can live with VS2005 + ReSharper. Oh, and if you purchase ReSharper you get a free upgrade to the next version that works with VS2005. Can't wait to see how the VS IDE enhancements plus the next version of ReShaper work together.
So to bullet point the great features if ReShaper that I really like:
- Refactoring
- Syntax Checking
- Code Generation
- Auto Code Formatting
- Customizable formatting and intellisense features
